News

   Monsters, robots, vampires and werewolves mingled with fans, followers, hundreds of journalists and, of course, stars, at this year's wild and crazy Comic-Con convention in San Diego. Among the wilder stunts was the warehouse Legendary Pictures turned into a Japanese monster theme park to promote Godzilla, and Ubisoft, the video game company, firing cannons from a pirate ship docked behind the convention center to generate buzz for Assassin's Creed 1V.

  This year's telecast of the Golden Globe awards has earned two Emmy nominations. The show, broadcast on NBC on January,  was nominated for the Outstanding Special Class Program and for Outstanding Writing for Variety Special.

   The Pablove Foundation is one of the many charities that receive an annual grant from the Hollywood Foreign Press and this year is no exception. It will receive $7,500 towards teaching photography to children with cancer.

  The Jerusalem Film Festival is the most important film event in Israel and for the past 30 years it has screened hundreds of Israeli movies, some of which went on to win major awards around the world. This year however, the stars of the festival were two Muslims, directors Mohsen Makhmalbaf from Iran and Ziad Doueiri from Lebanon.

The HFPA is to donate a record $1,567,650 to 50 diverse entertainment-related and charitable organizations this year. The donations, which will be presented at the annual installation and grants luncheon at the Four Seasons Hotel in August,  are for a wide range of projects, including the preservation of films, higher education, training and mentoring and the promotion of cultural exchange through film.

   Two-time Golden Globe nominee Lea Michele is mourning the death of her boyfriend and fellow Glee star Cory Monteith. Cory was at the Golden Globes ceremonies in both 2010 and 2011 when Michele was nominated as the best actress in a musical or comedy television series.

Those Apes are back!  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is filming in the steamy heat of New Orleans with Andy Serkis back in the role of Caesar the leader of the band of genetically evolved apes. HFPA members visited the set, at an abandoned Magic Mountain amusement park on the outskirts of the city (left)  and watched some of the filming, talking  with director Matt Reeves and some of the cast.

Jack Tewksbury takes a trip down Hollywood's Memory Lane.    Jake Rosenberg was the Waxman and Finke of the 1950-1960s, writing and publishing Hollywood Closeup, a back-stage weekly.

   Guillermo del Toro is a man with robots on his mind. The writer-director of the epic $180 million robots vs.

Liev Schreiber had a tough decision to make when he was offered the title role in Showtime’s new crime drama series Ray Donovan:  Did he want to leave his home in New York and the theater work he loves to move to Los Angeles to appear in a series that, if successful,  could tie him up for several years. ? “It was a very, very difficult decision,” he told HFPA members who met him at Sony Studios back in April when he began filming the series.